Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of October 30, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, November 6:  reading logs are due

Tuesday, November 7: ABL (sneakers are helpful) / Home Link due / McFarlands have P.E.: come prepared for swimming

Wednesday, November 8: full day / Mayberrys have P.E.: come prepared for swimming

Thursday, November 9: be caught up on math journal pages

Friday, November 10: Veterans Day observed, no school

Monday, November 13:  reading logs due

General News and Announcements

Parent/Teacher Conferences

Thanks to those of you with whom we have met so far!  We are enjoying making connections with families and discussing your kids!  Thank you also to those of you who have been able to move things around in order to reschedule this past Monday’s conferences.  Here’s hoping everyone has power again!

ABL (Adventure-Based Learning)

Last week, Mrs. Murray challenged our students to make as long a connected line as possible, using their bodies and any of their belongings.  Of course, each group started out by stretching as tall and as long as they could go.  But...then what?  Here’s what:

Academic Updates:

Writing Workshop

After much work on various aspects of narrative writing, students are nearly done with two pieces.  The first is their in-class piece, which we have been adding to and revising based on our workshop mini-lessons.  The second is the school-wide writing prompt, which the kids do independently.  They planned using the same graphic organizer/timeline we’ve used in class, and then they spent a second writing period drafting, revising, and editing the story independently.  This piece will show what our writers can do on their own, what they truly understand about writing a strong narrative, and how well they use resources around the classroom to improve their work.  It is also an exercise in stamina and problem-solving.  Both pieces will be scored using our Narrative Writing Rubric.  I look forward to seeing the growth!  

    Next up: opinion writing in the form of an essay!

Reading Workshop

Our mentor text, Journey, has provided rich opportunities for higher-level thinking!  And while our readers may not be able to replicate all of this in their own reading yet, they have built awareness, and they understand that it’s their responsibility as readers to think as they read:

• How does this part of the story connect with the main problem?
• Where am I in this story?  Should I be looking for clues of a turning point?
• The character is acting differently now...Why this change?
• This conversation the characters are having is important to the problem!
• The author expects me to understand what happened without telling me everything.
• I need to read ahead and backwards to try to understand unfamiliar words.
• I might need to revise my ideas about a character as I learn more about him.
• When the author brings up a topic over and over again, I need to realize that it’s important, and I need to be thinking about how and why it’s important.
• Authors often use setting details to show a mood.
• Characters’ feeling change often, but their traits rarely do.
• Level S books are level S for a reason!

    

Math

This week we continued to work on finding all the factors for a given number and listing the multiples for a given factor. Knowing basic multiplication facts truly helps make this work easier and students become more confident in their math work. In addition to these concepts, students worked on time conversions (hours, minutes and seconds) and we ended the week working with multiplicative comparison number stories.  

Theme

Students are doing a great job with their ‘cartography flipbook’ which defines various landforms and bodies of water. This project will roll into their final creative cartography project, to be revealed in a few weeks.